[ExI] Molecular Materialism

[Brent Allsop]

John Said:


 “No theory of qualia is testable.“


All the supporters of Representational Qualia Theory are predicting that
this claim will be falsified via a neural ponytail enabling is to directly
experience the qualities of other’s conscious knowledge.  It seems it would
help if you would canonize this view so we can find out and track how many
people agree, and not talk as if our view is the only view.


“Empiricism is all about objectivity, but qualia is about subjectivity.”


Precisely.  Once we discover which of our abstract objective descriptions
are describing what we directly experience as redness ang greenness, this
will connect the abstract objective to the qualitative subjective, making
it all objectively sharable and very objectively predictable as to who’s
subjective redness is like who’s subjective greenness.  (i.e. all the
relevant names, memories and association with elemental redness in one
brain will be bound to greenness in the others.)


Stuart LaForge pointed out some great new ways to empirically test for
Molecular Materialism.


Will responded to some of the other stuff Stuart was saying with:


determining what wavelengths can be seen is not the same as determining
what qualia are experienced.


I agree with Will here.  I think it is incorrect to assume that glutamate
or redness is always affiliated with red light.  It is more likely that
whatever is most important to that particular species will be represented
with glutamate/redness.  We need to be able to pick the strawberries from
the green leaves.  Since the strawberries are most important to us, and
since the ripe ones are the ones that reflect red light, that is why our
brain chooses to highlight the important ripe ones with glutamate redness.
For example, I believe bees can see wavelengths we can’t, which are the
wavelengths most likely to be reflected by flowers containing the most
nectar.  It is likely that evolution used glutamate redness to represent
these different raveling’s of light to highlight what is important to the
bees.


Bat’s use echolocation instead of light.  Their echolocation can detect
objects in the air.  I’d predict that a bat’s brain uses the same
redness/glutamate to highlight whatever echolocated data was is important
to the bat.



On Sun, Dec 29, 2019 at 8:41 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Well, determining what wavelengths can be seen is not the same as
> determining what qualia are experienced.
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
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